


Creatures at the Edge of the World

by swift_river_singing



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Confusion, F/F, Friendship, Gen, being a teenage girl in the world is really fucking complicated, friendships are messy, this is probably the closest thing to gen i will ever write, trust and the breaking thereof, werewolf shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 22:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swift_river_singing/pseuds/swift_river_singing
Summary: “I love you, you know that?” Lavender said abruptly. The words were too loud in the milky black.“I love you too,” Parvati said immediately, like a reflex, and then she wrinkled up her nose, rolled her shoulders back, nostrils pinching as she breathed in. “Let’s do something different, yeah? For the Fishes? The world’s an utter mess, a little more consciousness couldn’t hurt.”





	Creatures at the Edge of the World

Lavender reckons that if she stares hard enough she can almost see the gooseflesh rising, right on the strip of skin between Parvati's boots and the tailored hem of her trousers. Bet she's cold, Lavender thinks savagely. Parvati looks, like, stupidly cool; it's been at least half a year since Lavender last opened a fashion magazine, but she's seen enough skinny pout-mouthed girls stomping around in shoes like those to recognize that it's a bloody great outfit. Parvati could be an art student, or an off-duty model, or some shit. Typical.

Lavender tries to assemble her features into a sort of cool, pleasant smile, before she remembers the way the new scars move when she raises her eyebrows. She quickly ducks her head back down. Ankles again. Must be fucking freezing.

"So? Is that all I get?"

Lavender sniffs loudly--winter always makes her nose run--and says nothing. Parvati sighs.

"I think the silent treatment is a bit juvenile, Lav, even from you."

Jesus, she doesn't-- "I'm not being silent, Parvati," she snaps, drawing out the syllables--pahr-vah-ti. "I just don't have anything particular to say.”

Someone's dropped a styrofoam takeout container on the ground behind Parvati, a little mound of rice and a limp piece of broccoli dotting the pavement like some pathetic confetti. The crumpled plastic bag they came from flutters and is carried up by the wind, small petrochemical satellite.

With that jarring sense of depersonalization Lavender realizes that for the past few minutes at least half her brain activity has been focused on imagining what the pair of them must look like, figures in some black and white music video. She bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, curls and extends her toes against the soft scratch of her wool socks.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"Christ, Lav! You could start with 'Hey, Parvati, so sorry for disappearing off the face of the planet and ignoring all your owls for six months!' Like, did you think I wouldn't worry? Do you think I just like, don't give a damn?"

Parvati never swears, and the words sound stilted, like something she read in a book. She's rattled, and Lavender finds she can taste it, the hungry vicious thing inside her licking its lips. She laughs once, sharp, letting the thing curl around her tongue.

"I'm sorry. You're so right, Parvati, god, how very dreadful of me to run off and leave you all alone in your massive flat, with your Gringotts job and your hair potions and your 200 galleon coats, and, and your hurt feelings! I guess I was a little preoccupied with, I don't know, being a werewolf?" Lavender can hear the grate of hysteria in her own voice, imagines Parvati telling her to calm down as she always does, and she wants to bloody scream, take a great fucking bite out of the sky and spit it in Parvati's face, turn around and sprint somewhere anywhere until the wind unravels her sinews from her bones.

Parvati's mouth does that nervous twitchy thing and Lavender's back in her head again, letting the drama of the scene yank her forward, the boom and the crash and the foam.

"Anyway," she says, sudden crystalline calm, "That's the past. It's probably best that we just move on."  
______________________________________________________________________________

The last time Lavender spoke to Parvati would have been in that hostel in Playa del Carmen. Well, not spoke, exactly. Lavender was folded into a neon green hammock, swinging idly and watching a German couple in capri pants try to hoist their heavy packs into the storage locker. The door was open to the street, and Lavender heard the blast of an advertisement over a car loudspeaker, the honking of horns, and maybe the slap of waves beyond? (She wasn't sure, still, if the Thing had heightened her senses, or if the extra sounds and smells were just a ripe new delirium).

It was hot, and the moon was next week; she felt flattened with the effort of each breath, the wringing out and refilling of her lungs like the mangy corner of a kitchen sponge. There was half a joint still tucked into the bag by her feet, but the thought of sitting up to retrieve it seemed unfathomable. When the little brown owl tapped on the window behind her head she knew that it was Parvati's.

Parvati had stopped sending her own tawny owl after one of Lavender's jinxes actually hit. Lavender had felt quite guilty after, for the bird's sake, and slept fitfully for several night, blooms of soft down lining her dreams. There had been no more owls for about a month, and then one day a truly massive grey bird was waiting for Lavender outside the corner market by her hostel in Mexico City, wings flapping deep and frantic like it knew as well as she how little it belonged there. She ignored it, of course, until a group of children's curious stares turned to throwing stones and the owl was forced to beat a hasty retreat. The birds had been smaller, after that, but no less unwelcome.

That smoky heavy afternoon in Playa, though. It might have been the heat, or the deadened scrape of her joints in their sockets, the way she couldn’t quite open her jaw without feeling it click, the aching weariness pressing from her skull to her shinbones despite the soft sponge of the weed from earlier. Lavender relented. Scanning the room and finding herself unobserved, she drew her wand from her waistband and muttered a hasty “Alohamora." She watched the window swing open; a little burnt caramel body swooped in and landed on the sill, where it regarded her with the mistrustful gaze of a creature who’d spent far too long on the wing without so much as an owl treat to show for it. Haughtily, it extended its leg, and Lavender untied the slender roll of parchment.

She scanned it, quickly, then flipped it over, held it up to the light, huffed. "Eloquent as ever,” she informed the owl, which turned to preen itself. She pulled a pen out of her bag and leaned out of the hammock to scrawl “Right back at you :)” on the blank side. A bit of dirt from the linoleum floor had stuck to the back of the parchment, and Lavender scratched it off with the edge of her thumbnail, noticing as she did so the way her “y” looped breezily under the rigid raging silhouette of Parvati’s handwriting. She was seized with the sudden impulse to rip the letter, if you could call it that, smaller and smaller until the edges were soft and frayed as old denim. Instead she exhaled, re-rolled the parchment, and tilted her chin at the expectant owl. She blew a kiss after it, as it flew off.

(After that came Tulum, and the ruins, and the scare at the cenote, bright eyes in the deep bright eyes in the street bright eye in the sky, and Lavender did not spend much time dwelling on what followed.)

______________________________________________________________________________

Someone in the flat across the street is listening to Donna Lewis.

"Do you hear that?" Lavender asks, before she can stop herself. "It's the—“

The words sour on her palette, and she stops.

"Hear what, Lavender?" Lavender sucks in her cheeks, looks away. Parvati rolls her eyes.

"No, Lavender, I don't hear anything."  
______________________________________________________________________________

May. Parvati cross-legged on the bed, squinting—she was too vain to wear glasses, too astigmatic for contacts, despite the headaches—peering at Lavender's eyelid as she traced a careful black line down the edge. "Stop blinking, Lav, I'm not going to hurt you, just relax.”

"I am relaxed," indignant, but she opened her mouth to soften her eyes, trying to avoid exhaling right in Parvati's face.

"Sorry if my breath's bad," she muttered, and Parvati smiled.

"It's not.”

"Okay, open?” Parvati said, pursing her lips. "Have a look." Lavender obeyed.

Later the pillowy dark and the light from the moon and the candles washing the room in gentle unreality, Lavender and Parvati laughing louder and wilder to compensate. Old Ogden's scorching sparkler-traces down their throats and they felt the sizzle all the way in their fingertips, like they could scratch their initials across the whole bloody world.

Lavender had secured the fire whiskey from Cormac with her signature move: walk past the table in a cluster of girls, let your fingers trail secretly boldly over the firm lines of his shoulder blades, silver-quick; half a second later, look back and meet his gaze. Parvati was prettier, but Lavender had the move; the allure was likely something in the hollow curve of her stare but she didn’t like to think much of that, not when her mouth was ringed around some boy’s cock and he was looking at her like she was potent and powerful both. Anyway there was that and then it was easy enough to wheedle the whiskey out of him, would be easy too, next week, when she wanted those sweets or that book from the library, not a transaction, definitely, just like, easy, and then the whole affair would be over, clean.

Lavender watched Parvati take another deep swig, an amber drop running down her chin before she swiped at it with the back of her hand.

“Do you ever wonder where Hermione goes?" Lavender asked. "Like, what if she has some secret life, besides all the books and the saving the world and the, you know--" Lavender pulled a haughty face, drawing her nose up and furrowing her eyebrows, and Parvati giggled.

"Yeah, like what if she's having some passionate affair with, like, a professor?”

"Or a house elf.”

Parvati snorted. Lavender did not mention the dream she had the other week, messy brown curls / gentle slope of thighs / the smell of old books and handsoap. She had only snogged Hermione the once, back in fourth year, and she had been so fully drunk and hormonal that it didn't seem worth making a whole thing of it. Not that Parvati would have minded, exactly, since it wasn't like Lavender was, like, gay or something, but — Lavender didn’t like to do anything that could upset Parvati. Parvati was tough as nails, obviously, razor’s edge, but there were perhaps only three people in the world who had seen her when her careful flame turned to wildfire and she went roaring into shakey-panic-chaos. Lavender was one of those people and the knowledge of that seemed so delicate and so precious.

“Ooh… Lav, Lav!” Parvati jumped off the bed, swayed a second and then balanced, “this is the song I was thinking of, this one! I wanna dance!”

Parvati was an utter lightweight, and when she was drunk she danced like a twelve-year-old, a manic bobbing twisting whirl that only occasionally slipped into time with the music before unwinding to its own helter-skelter discord. Her eyes were closed and she was laughing, and Lavender thought that Parvati was probably the best person she would ever know, just like that, “She is probably the best person you will ever know.” Lilting synth-y melody coming from the stereo, I love you, always forever, near and far, closer together, everywhere I will be with you.

“Laaaaav, come dance!” Holding out her hand and Lavender took it and spun her and they stumbled their way through the swing steps Lav remembered from the class her mum had forced on her, and the waltz from the Yule Ball in fourth year, and then they did the pretzel, and then they spun some more until they collapsed lightheaded onto the cool stone floor. Parvati’s hair was tickling Lavender’s nose and she smoothed it away and giggled. The sharp angle of Parvati’s chin her neck and the warm nest of her lap and they fell asleep there, probably, Donna still crooning. Say you’ll love, love me forever, never stop, never whatever, near and far and always and everywhere and everything.

Lavender woke to the sun streaming through the sunlight in evil rays, and Parvati was humming to herself as she straightened up the room. Lavender's brain felt more or less like it had been parboiled, but of course Parvati was never hungover.

"Oh! Your majesty! You're awake! Shall I summon the chambermaid?"

Lavender threw a shoe at her and missed wildly.

"Hey! Rude!" said Parvati, and cackled. "You should get McLaggen to train you for Chaser--bet he thinks you've got quite the arm."

"Fuck off, " said Lavender, pressing her forehead against the chill of the floor and breathing against the lurching spin of the room. "Be nice to me, I might die soon."

"Nah." Parvati plopped down next to her and rubbed her back. Lavender groaned in pleasure, then winced as the noise echoed in the throb behind her temples. "We're way, way too hot to die," Parvati continued, softer, and she gathered Lavender’s hair in her hand to blow gently on the back of her neck. "Think of the boys! Think of the mourning!"

"Gneagh," Lavender agreed, and promptly fell back asleep, Parvati’s cool fingertips swirling silky blue streaks through her dreams.

 ______________________________________________________________________________

Parvati’s got scuff marks on the side of her boots, Lavender notices, smears of chalky white like bone. She is trying to catch Lavender’s eye but Lavender does not look up.

“I don’t know where you get off, being angry at me,” Parvati says finally. “Really. I’ve tried to understand but I just, I don’t. I know I haven’t always been the best friend, but—“

“I’m not, I’m not angry at you, all right? I wasn’t angry, I’m not angry, I just needed some fucking space, okay? After everything?" She kicks the ground and immediately feels ridiculous, barrels on: "My head’s been a mess, and you, everything we were doing and saying, or not saying, just felt, like, toxic, you know?”

Lavender chose the words to cut, and they hit their mark. Parvati blinks, presses her lips together, swallows. Lavender’s gaze catches on the tilt of her chin; it’s jarring for a second until the incongruity resolves—that’s a Padma face, she’s set her jaw like her sister. Lavender presses her fingertips into the tops of her thighs as if they could burrow inside.

______________________________________________________________________________

“I know Gryffindors are meant to be the brave ones, but there isss—“ Dean was slurring his words, the arm looped around Seamus’s neck apparently the only thing keeping him upright— “no!” (He paused for breath) “no way I would have the BALLS to have a party in a bloody classroom.” He nodded emphatically, looking pleased with himself for finishing the sentence, and Seamus and Lavender laughed.

“Ravenclaws are, like, seriously underrated,” said Parvati excitedly, pupils wide and dark. Lavender smiled, sleepy slow.

Earlier, Seamus had secreted her away to the corner by the goblin maps, opened his palm to show her a handful of golden green nuggets. “You’ll like this, Lav,” he said. “C’mere, I’ll show you.”

“Seamus,” she said, punching his arm, “mate, this is never going to work if you’re always trying to change me. You have to understand, I’m a whiskey man through and through, none of your hippie free love ganja bullshit for me. I like a nice scotch and a drink with the lads, see?”

“You wound me, Lav. Free love, me?” Seamus said, mock hurt, before bending down to whisper in his palm. “And don’t you listen to the mean lady, MJ, you’re nicer than any scotch.”

They crouched outside on the grass and Seamus tried to show her how to roll the joint. “Now you try,” he said, but then she ripped the papers twice and gave up. She managed to light it with the snapping thing she and Parvati had been practicing on the candles, though, and it was just as cool as she hoped it’d be, even if the sticky acrid after was rather disappointing and only made her throat itch.

“Just breathe, love,” Seamus reminded her, and she stuck her tongue out at him before coughing so hard she nearly bit it off.

“That’s the ticket,” and Seamus smiled approvingly, and it was funny how people made such a big deal of smoking spliff and then it wasn’t much of anything, was it, you couldn’t even feel it. But it was lucky Seamus was there, Seamus who was the best bloke in the whole world, who was so kind and so handsome and would never ask anything of Lavender and who had somehow managed to get the starlight caught up in his hair. He was talking and his voice sounded like… like camembert, sort of creamy and bitter, like.

“Your voice is cheesy, Seamus,” she said, and cracked up.

He was talking about Dean, she registered, distant dreamy rambling, and she let his voice draw close over her like patchwork and the quivery crackling hum of insects and the stars like jellyfish drifting in the sky, and then after a bit they went back inside.

“What’s this about Ravenclaws?” asked Terry Boot, sidling up behind Parvati. She turned and beamed up at him, and Lavender thought there was something pointy about his face and she realized that Terry was not, in fact, quite cute and witty as she had previously thought, but rather a sneaky pokey-faced person and there was no reason for Parvati to be looking at him like that. She felt blurry, smeared, and when Parvati and Terry had closed the classroom door behind them she sank down against the wall, stretching her legs in front of her.

"They didn't waste time, did they?" Padma's voice was cooler than Parvati's, morning frost and murky lake water, with that slight halting quality that Parvati trained herself out of but Padma never bothered to.

“I say good for Parvati,” Lavender said, reflexively. “She’s been so stressed lately, she could use something fun.”

Padma raised an eyebrow but sat down next to Lavender, folding her legs carefully underneath her and tipping her head back against the stone wall.

“This whole thing’s pretty fucked, if you ask me,” she said, eyes on the chair leg in front of her. “It’s getting borderline apocalyptic out there, you know, and then we’re in here getting smashed and worrying about coursework and who’s shagging who.”

“Ooh, does that mean you’ve got gossip?” Lavender said, but her laugh felt shallow. Padma flicked a piece of lint off her tights.

“Sorry,” Lavender tried, after a moment. “I don’t mean—Like, I know it’s… It’s getting bad. My dad isn't reading the Prophet anymore, and my mum reads like every fucking line, and they both get this panicky look every time I go into London at night. And what happened to Susan's..." she swallowed, "Susan's family."

It was a tidal rush of terror when Lavender let herself think about it, the immense and shattering knowledge that things were so very far from okay, that they were every day more and more hemmed in by some brutal jagged dark and Lavender could feel her skin go clammy, chills moving wraithlike up her forearms shoulders forehead and the pressing weight like drowning or maybe the moment before, the current pulling you under and the sand and the desperate rasping hopeful gasp on the tender edge of annihilation.

Padma laughed once, dry and harsh. "You don't have to tell me, Lavender. I know."

And Lavender inhaled strong and steady to counter the icy pinpricks up and down her skin, and she mustered a smile and said, "Yeah. Yeah, no, I figured."

Padma licked her lips and the movement was so familiar and so strange at once. Lavender found that she was staring. She blinked.

"I was reading this thing yesterday, for Divs," she said, without really meaning to. "About, um, the Aztecs, in Mexico? How things must have been the day before the Spanish came, I guess, and what it would have been like, and wondering if anyone felt it coming. And they had all that shit to measure the stars and stuff, and all the massive cities and the gold, and they still didn’t--I dunno. Like Pompei before the explosion, or whatever..." She trailed off. Padma was studying her, something cold in her face like sheet rock but her mouth was smiling.

"There are accounts of it, you know," Padma said, and she cocked her head like she was letting Lavender in on a secret.

"The before, and the after--as if there's any meaningful ‘before’ when the now's got you in a chokehold and you're indentured to some priest and your friends and family are dead or enslaved. Which, to my understanding, was the situation of most of the brown people the Europeans 'discovered,'" and she was talking faster and did the air quotes with one of her hands. "But there's this one, like, incredible book, a codex, you know? This friar interviewed all of these Nahua people and collected the stories and, you know, presumably he had people to do it, but it was written up in Spanish and Nahuatl both--you know, the Aztec language?"

(Lavender did not know, but she nodded, trying to focus)

"And it's interesting," Padma continued, "because we all hear the story of how the leaders thought they were prophesied gods, the white people, but it was probably political machinations on the leaders' part as much as anything, which is just, you know, more revisionist colonial bullshit. But anyway. The book. There's this passage where the guy is talking about the Spanish arriving, and it's not just the men, right? Or even just the guns? It's the dogs, and it's the horses. The Nahua narrator, he said, let me see if I can remember," and she squeezed her eyes shut, drumming her fingers against her collarbone.

"They had burning eyes, yellow and fiery," Padma intoned. "They did not keep quiet, they went about panting.' That's the dogs. And then the horses, they used the word for 'deer,' which is curious, he was sort of fascinated and repulsed by them, the way they sweat, all the noise and the neighing. 'And their flecks of foam splatted on the ground like soapsuds splatting. As they went they made a beating, throbbing and hoof-pounding like throwing stones. Their hooves made holes, they dug holes in the ground wherever they placed them.'" Padma open her eyes, looking triumphant at the test of memory, not that Lavender could have called her on it had she botched the line.

"Wow," said Lavender, not sure what else to say. "It sounds so--loud, doesn't it?"

"Exactly," said Padma, smile widening, and she looked like Parvati when she got her Divination homework back only grimmer and more fey. "Do you get what I'm saying? It wasn't about, like, before and after, they couldn't think of it like that. It was just this pure sensory overload, you know, this monstrous end of days and all they could look at was the fucking dogs, and the horses, digging caverns with their feet and sweating and the dog's eyes like, like the inferno, do you see? You can't prepare for that, in the end, you're just an animal with the other animals and it's your body and your blood and your saliva on the line. The animal's the part that matters." She paused for breath, and caught Lavender's eye, looked embarrassed suddenly.

"Sorry. I've just been going on and on. But, I mean, do you get it? In the battles and stuff, after, the Nahua would, like, count the number of horses they killed, as well as the people, and sometimes they'd sacrifice the horses along with the humans they captured. It's this ontological muddying, you see what I mean? That's the crisis point. That's how we'll know, the noise and the overload and the collapse."

Later Lavender would furtively look up "ontological," while she was ostensibly retrieving a Charms book from the library. For now, though, she just nodded.

"You get what I mean?" Padma asked again, and Lavender heard Parvati's laugh tinny and faint through the door, and Christ, she was never smoking again, and the room wobbled on its axis and her hand was on Padma's thigh and Padma running cool fingertips up the bone of her forearm.

"Yeah," she said, but she was still thinking about it later when she kissed her.  
______________________________________________________________________________

( After. The morning in Tulum after it happened Lavender woke up shoulders screaming, heartbeat shoving out her breath shaky-heavy like the first cup of coffee slamming through a hangover. Her body felt cobbled together. There was blood under her nails and her mouth tasted dry and alien and when she licked her lips there was blood there too. She tried to sit up, vomited, lay back down and curled tight into a ball and the grass underneath was sharp as paper. There was a trail of brownish red beside her. She closed her eyes. She was outside and she shouldn't be outside; she didn't know why she was outside. Distant tinny screaming but she thought it was in her head, it was probably in her head, and her left thigh was aching when she ran her hand down it it was damp and the wound looked ragged like a bite. She squeezed her eyes shut against the glare of the sun but through the slit she could see a winding smear of blood, dark like an oil spill, leading off into the woods to the hollow pool of water the eye the deep, no, to a shape on the ground-- a boulder? A dog? A deer? Or something else, a different kind of body--Lavender was having trouble breathing; she retched again, and her vision went black. )

______________________________________________________________________________  
In September Lavender woke each morning jaw heavy and pinch-tight, and Parvati carried with her the weary haunted look of someone three times her age. When they met at the Muggle teashop they cast Muffliato before even greeting each other. Lavender was not sure when simply being began to feel so dangerous, but the last murder was just down the street from her auntie's flat in Yorkshire and after when people bumped into her on the streets she did not shove back but flinched away.

Parvati pulled back her hood and lifted the mug of Darjeeling to her face, eyes closing trancelike. There was always something piercingly real about Parvati, Lavender thought. She was material, the sharp immanence of a statue, a painting, a carving--not comforting, not altogether human, even, but present.

"How are you doing, babe?" Lavender asked, tapping the edge of her sandal against Parvati's shin.

"Oh, you know," said Parvati. She took a careful sip of her tea and opened her eyes. "There's the eclipse next week--have you thought about what you want to do?"

"In Pisces, yeah," said Lavender. In truth she'd forgotten; her mind was a murky wasteland lately and she hadn't cast the cards in at least a month. "You can come to mine; my mum'll be out of town, and dad's in bed early these days."

"Brilliant. Padma got me some new crystals I'd love to try."

"And I've got the finest wine four sickles can buy," Lavender said, and Parvati giggled.

"God, I've missed you, Lav," she said. "I feel like I've hardly seen you all summer."

Guilt pooled thick and black in her gut and she wondered for an instant if this was the moment. On the radio David Gahan growling whining, What do you expect of me?/ What is it you want?/  
Whatever you've planned for me/ I'm not the one. Parvati's slender hands clutching the tea cup, the crisp blue of her nail polish. Lavender cupped her wrist with her other hand, plucked at the hairband there before she remembered with horror that it was Padma's. She stuffed her fists in her lap.

"I'm sorry, love. My parents hardly let me leave the house now, you know how it is."

Parvati gave a little half shrug. "Tell me about it. It's like, my parents have never stuck their necks out politically. I hardly think I'm some Death Eater's number one target."

It wasn’t funny but Lavender laughed anyway.

Under the sky that night and the wine tasted sour, and they couldn’t decide if it had gone off or if it was just shite quality as Lavender suspected, and so they screwed their mouths up and sipped it anyway. Parvati was hunched over a star chart, dim light from her wand making the lines and planes and angles look topographic.

“I love you, you know that?” Lavender said abruptly. The words were too loud in the milky black.

“I love you too,” Parvati said immediately, like a reflex, and then she wrinkled up her nose, rolled her shoulders back, nostrils pinching as she breathed in. “Let’s do something different, yeah? For the Fishes? The world’s an utter mess, a little more consciousness couldn’t hurt.”

Lavender shifted in her seat but nodded. “We could do that fire thing, maybe? Burn away false desires?”

Parvati gave no sign of hearing her. “Here’s an idea. Let’s do some Legilimency, yeah?”

“Oh, come on, you know I’m crap at that,” Lavender said with a small laugh.

Parvati narrowed her eyes; Lavender shivered. “I’ll make it easy on you, no walls. Total openness, right?” She reached across the armrest of her chair, squeezed her hand over top of Lavender’s then pulled back. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“Same, love,” said Lavender. “Everyone else is terrible. You’re the best thing in my life.” The words rang familiar like an incantation.

As Parvati shifted to face her, scraping her chair across the deck, Lavender could swear she heard something shatter— a sheet of glass, a mirror, a bone? But Parvati did not move, and so she must have imagined it. A mosquito buzzed by Lavender’s forearm; she slapped it down with the hand that clutched her wand, then raised it once more. The light from the dual spells lent a ghoulish glow to the angles of Parvati’s face.

“On three,” said Parvati, and Lavender nodded.

After they were silent, just sighs and little huffing breaths heavy with dread or maybe fury. Silently they gathered up the charts, the wine glasses; silently Parvati unlocked the front door, handed Lavender her coat.

“Are you,” Parvati said, eyes fixed on the doorframe but so gently Lavender wanted to weep, “Are you still seeing her?”

“No,” said Lavender.

Silently she walked to the Portkey, images playing on loop in the twisted movie house of her brain: the body twisting jerking groaning smiling underneath her, on the marble on the wood on the grass on the cotton sheets and the mothwing flutter of her eyelashes, and the fold of Parvati’s face where, Lavender realized, she had been storing up a thousand little heartbreaks just to hand them over like parchment, inch by inch.

(This was not, however, the end. That would come much later, after the battle, after the funerals, after everything, and by that time Lavender was no longer sure its cause.)

______________________________________________________________________________

“All right,” says Parvati.

Lavender is not sure how long they have been silent for.

“Okay, Lavender, I’ll bite. What do you want from me? What do you bloody well want? What didn’t I give you? I did wonder if...”

And of course that’s what it’s always been about, hasn’t it, didn’t the voices in Lavender’s head tell her as much, didn’t she suspect, fucking idiot that she was?

"I don't--" Lavender looks around wildly, “ I don't fucking know what I want, okay? Like, yes, I've thought about stuff once or twice, I've wondered, but Christ, I've had sex dreams about Seamus before, and it doesn't mean our whole relationship's been poisoned by, by some lustful deception or whatever!"

"Lav," and Parvati's doing the calm thing again, and she reaches for Lavender's hand, pressing it between the cool of her palms and for a moment Lavender imagines she can feel her lifeline. "Lav, you have to admit it's weird, right, that you shagged my sister?" She laughs and the rattle catches in her throat, bone dry. "My identical twin sister, Lavender?"

"Christ, Parvati! It's not, everything I do is not about you! Okay? Sometimes I just do stuff, okay? I am a," she chokes but barrels on, "I was a human being, and I was a kid, and I made dumb mistakes like we all do, and it's not all some big, like, internalized deep dark secret! Life's not a bloody romance novel, Parvati."

"Okay," says Parvati, and she's talking faster, “Okay. So then what I don't understand is, why did you do it? And why didn’t you talk to me? Because I've been trying really hard to forgive you, Lavender, but I just don't know how I can trust you, after this. I don't know how." She's clenching and unclenching her fist over the rim of her handbag and god fucking damn it, Lavender still wants to grab her hand, lead her inside and wrap her in a blanket and put on Radiohead and burn the popcorn and everything will be okay, everything will always be okay, because they love each other and it's them against the world.

Parvati's eyes are red-rimmed now and down the street a group of blokes is leaning and lurching out of a taxi, slurring or chanting some pathetic ode to their penises or some unintelligible rubbish.

"And if it's nothing to do with me, that's almost worse, isn't it? Because that means you didn't care? You did it, and you didn't even think about me, or how I would feel?" Parvati is crying and the last syllable is more of a squeak; Lavender's insides feel like they've been shrinkwrapped (and she's always been a sympathetic cryer.)

"I'm not," Lavender says, softer, and she sniffs, "I'm not saying it had nothing to do with you. Of course you were part of it somehow, but not--not like that, I mean, I don't think. Like I think I would know, if I was secretly in love with you, right? And I don't know. I've never known. And I'm sorry about Padma. But I'm, I'm going to see people, you know? That's how it goes, being an adult."

"Lav. It's not about that. I know you're going to see people, I'm not a child. And yes, it's absolute shite that you disappeared, but you always do that, with Ron and with all those other boys, and then I guess with my bloody sister, not that I knew--but" (she wraps her arm around her stomach, clutching at her hip) "you don't get it. There was a fucking war on, I don't care who you bloody well shag. That's not what I mean."

"Okay. Okay. So what do you mean, Parvati?"

Parvati stares at some point over Lavender's shoulder, and Lavender watches her chest rise and then-- "i can't. I just, I can't right now, I don't, I can't trust you." And Parvati's turned and she's striding down the street and Lavender calls after her, dazed, to wait, to talk to her, and she practically sprints to catch up with her.

"Parvati, you're the one who wanted to talk, can you--" she grabs for Parvati's arm but Parvati shrugs her away and walks faster. The wind has picked up and it's cold against Lavender's teeth, and even now she can feel the pull of the moon and the tides of her blood. Parvati stumbles and her ankle almost turns; Lavender catches her.

"PARVATI. Stop. Your--those are really great shoes, by the way," (she can hear the way her voice lifts up like a question, gives a small and nervous laugh that Parvati does not reciprocate.) "Sorry. Can you just, please, tell me what you're so angry about?"

Parvati is rocking back and forth on her heels, and she is looking determinedly at Lavender's ear.

"I'm angry because you left. You left me, okay? You left, and I'm just, I've been so lonely." Her voice breaks on the last syllable.

"I know." Lavender sinks down on the stoop behind her, the dull cold of the cement stairs.  
"I don't know how to be, like, us anymore, you know?" I don't know who I am; I don't know who you are; I don't know when you stopped loving me; I feel like you stopped loving me; did you stop loving me? "I felt this distance, even before everything, and maybe it's about me, about how I am, you know, the, the liking girls thing, I don't know--"

"Just because I'm not a lesbian doesn't mean I'm some raging homophobe, Lavender! You could have talked to me. I may not know what it's like to like girls, or to be, to have lycanthropy, but I'm here, Lav."

"I know. But I still feel like, like it's a distance. And then after everything, now I'm even more of a walking disaster zone, and I--I didn't need you managing me, Parvati. And hovering, and the passive aggressive shit like there was something I was hiding from you! I'm not a fucking storybook character, okay?"

Parvati's lips tighten and for an instant in the light of a passing car her eyes look yellow. "So did it work, Lavender? Did it make you feel strong? Do you feel powerful, shutting me out?"

Yes. No. I don't know. She is crying and she hates it and also feels the bitter satisfaction of it, see, you did this to me. She wonders if anyone has watched their scene; she wonders if her mascara is smudged; she wonders if this is all they get.

"I miss you," she says instead. "I don't know how to fix this."

"You don't get to act like you're the only one who's got problems," says Parvati, and her voice sounds like sandpaper. "Try being the only brown girl in your dorm, your classes, and sitting and smiling every time some idiot makes jokes or, or even Trewlawney, right? All the shit she was always asking me about how mystical india was, wanting to know what Mum had taught me, if there were any secret rituals. I've been dealing with that my whole life, okay? That's what you do, you fucking deal with it. You don't go running off to bloody Mexico like some overprivileged posh twat."

"That is rich coming from you, Parvati. How much did you spend on those boots? I don't think either of us has had exactly what you'd call an underprivileged upbringing."

"Brilliant, okay, yeah, I'll just shut up then." Parvati is pacing back and forth. "You're really unbelievable, Lav, like, I can't--I can't be here right now." Somehow Lavender senses what she's about to do the moment before it happens; maybe it's the last twitch of the tattered thread she's always imagined winding between them, but Lavender lurches forward and grabs Parvati's calf just in time to feel the nauseating hook spinning out from her navel. She dry heaves as the world settles back around her.

Wherever they are is the fearful kind of dark, the kind where you can't tell if your eyes are open or closed. Above a soft cooing hoot, and another, a rustle, a scratch like talons on wood. The air is thick and musty with the nitric smell of bird. Lavender's breath is shallow, muscles still hairspring tense. Out of the thick black Lavender can hear Parvati moving; there is her outline, now, against the faint form of a window of sorts. Lavender hears the gravelly slide of her hand smoothing down her trousers absently; Parvati is breathing through her nose but it echoes hard and heavy in Lavender's ears. Lavender moves to stand behind her; she oversteps and bumps into her instead, the rough feathers of Parvati's hair tickling her her nose. In the stillness the cacophony of small animal movements above is dizzying.

Last summer Lavender forgot to rattle her keys as she entered her parents' home, and she walked in on her father and mother at the kitchen table, her father curled up on himself like a centipede, staring at his clenched fists. "I think, Maureen," he said, "I think if I started crying I might never stop." Her mother shifted, blocking her father from view. Lavender thought she might have rubbed a hand down his back but she couldn't be sure they even touched. The look on her mother's face was hard like pavement.

"So this," says Parvati. "This is where I would come, if you're wondering. So, yeah, I guess I really am that pathetic."

Reckon I know these owls, then, Lavender thinks, and she's not sure why that thought sends goosebumps down her arms. She feels, she realizes, fuzzy, strange, and her head is still spinning, and she thinks it must be from the Apparating, so she clutches at the wooden ledge, pivots, slides carefully to the floor as the world sways back and forth and above the birds and outside the birds, and the bats and the bugs and the wind in the trees and Parvati's thunderous heartbeat.

"I think-- I think I did something bad, Parvati."

"No kidding."

"No, I mean... I mean, um, really bad? When I was in--" she's gasping and the pressure in her head feels like the end of days, "when I was there, in Mexico, in Tulum, there was a night where, I think I might have--" and it's so cold, Christ, why is it so cold, and it's there again, the feathers, the dark limp shape, the howl the cold the black the white dots the vortex like maybe the universe or maybe the end the funnel (the tunnel?) and someone is screaming is she the one screaming and this is it this is what it feels like to die and it's almost a relief to know just to know and distantly Parvati's voice and she's yelling and the words land and don't you bloody do this Lavender, don't you fucking DARE and it's so stupid but somehow that's enough and she blinks and the breathes and Parvati's voice is soft but the edges are shrill and she's telling her to feel the ground underneath her, to feel each of her limbs, to count five things she notices, and to breathe, and to breathe, and to breathe.

Lavender breathes, and Parvati is holding her, and she breathes.

"That was scary," she says, when she can talk, and Parvati presses a kiss to her forehead.

"Yeah." Lavender hears the quiver of relief in her voice.

"Are you--are we?" Lavender asks.

She is sweating, cool and sticky against her blouse and the wispy fibers of Parvati's jumper. Parvati squeezes her close; Lavender imagines a dozen different expressions on her face.

"I don't know," says Parvati. She curls her legs up beside her, the scrape of her boot buckle against the floorboard echoed in a rustle of restless wings above.

Outside the moon. Far beyond the city, still farther the sea. Outside the patterns wheeling. Inside the two of them, swallowed up by the dark mouth of the little wooden hut.

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a tiny little drabble and developed a life of its own over many nights of waiting for various trains and buses, which is apparently the only time I get any writing done. 
> 
> The text referenced is the Florentine Codex, Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s ethnograpy of Aztec society. Compiled between 1545 and 1590, the text is based on the testimony of Aztec informants and presented in both Spanish and Nahuatl. Like many colonial texts, both informative and deeply disturbing. 
> 
> Songs referenced are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs6NXpUAKeo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwhpbnisszU. I have a very long Parvati/Lavender playlist now, though, so feel free to message me for songs. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
